30 November, 2017

Max
Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss China's superiority in supercomputer
power field and the possible impact on China's domination in the
CryptoCurrency markets of the future. As Herbert describes based on a
related article from Technology
Review:

If you want to crunch the
world’s biggest problems, head east. According to a newly published
ranking, not only is China home to the world’s two fastest
supercomputers, it also has 202 of the world’s fastest 500 such
devices—more than any other nation. Meanwhile, America’s fastest
device limps into fifth place in the charts, and the nation occupies
just 144 of the top 500 slots, making it second according to that
metric.

The world’s fastest
supercomputer is still TaihuLight, housed at the National
Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. Capable of performing 93
quadrillion calculations per second, it’s almost three times faster
than the second-place Tianhe-2. The Department of Energy’s
fifth-placed Titan supercomputer, housed at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, performs 17.6 quadrillion calculations per second—making
it less than a fifth as fast as TaihuLight.

The American government is
painfully aware that it’s now a laggard, and a $258 million funding
injection into the Department of Energy’s exascale computing
project is supposed to ready a system capable of performing one
quintillion operations per second—10 times the capacity of
TaihuLight—by 2021. But, er, China reckons it will achieve the same
feat as soon as 2020. Right now, then, China has America’s
supercomputing industry beat.

As
Keiser points out:

This
is very important because competing power and speed are the defining
characteristics of a superpower. It's not about weapons, it's not
about infrastructure so much, it's not about having cultural soft
power. It's about having really fast supercomputers.

One
obvious application is that China will be in a position to dominate
the CryptoCurrency market, and CryptoCurrency market is the de facto
21st century economy and finance and currency, so this is part of the
Chinese 21st century program, China 2025.

The
article from the Technology Review also describes a fierce
competition between China and the United States in the supercomputer
power field. However, concerning the CryptoCurrency markets, China
has already a big disadvantage against the US, not only because of
its current superiority in supercomputers, but mostly because of the
different policies adopted. The United States insists on the obsolete
system of the traditional US dollar as the global exchange currency,
while struggles to maintain that system through wars and devastating
interventions around the globe, exactly because the US foreign policy
has been totally surrendered to the financial-military-industrial
complex.

As
has been described
recently, Russia also made a first move to issue its own
CryptoCurrency. While Vladimir Putin implied that CryptoRouble comes
as a natural attempt by Russia to participate in rapid developments
in the sector of monetary and commercial transactions, it is quite
probable that there are other reasons too. At the time where Russia
struggles to overcome continuous sanctions by the West and BRICS seek
complete independence from the Western monetary monopoly, the move
could contribute significantly towards the achievement of both of
these goals.

Previously,
we had the first serious attack against Bitcoin by the Western
banking cartel through JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, which was a serious
indication that Bitcoin and other CryptoCurrencies could become a
real threat against cartel's monetary monopoly, which gives
significant power to the mega-banks of the West, even up to the point
to 'design'
major financial crises.

Dimon's
attack could be related to a recent
statement
made by the Head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Kirill
Dmitriev, that the BRICS are considering to create their own
CryptoCurrency for the purposes of global commerce.

Such
a move could help BRICS to decouple economies from the Western
neoliberal monetary monopoly, even faster. With the technology of
more powerful computers in close future that could 'mine'
CryptoCurrencies at much faster rate, the number of people who will
choose to abandon traditional currencies may rise rapidly. Those who
will set-up such a de-centralized financial system, will gain a great
advantage against the obsolete system of traditional currencies
controlled by central banks.

Petrodollar
already struggles to maintain its dominance as many countries have
chosen to 'revolt' against it and proceed in major transactions with
domestic currencies, or suggest such an alternative. Latest
example, Venezuela.

As
the BRICS bloc grows economically quite fast, the prospect of a BRICS
CryptoCurrency will contribute to the quicker demolition of dollar
domination. There is a deeper reason for which the US empire is
terrified in such a case. Since the early 70s with the abolition of
the gold standard, dollar became the dominant currency in global
scale. This fact permitted the US financial-military-industrial
complex, expressed by the neocon/neoliberal ideology, to design
economic and military wars in every corner of the planet to maximize
its power and profits. All it needed was just machines printing
dollars. The rest was the easy part.

Therefore,
the prospect of a global economy flooded with decentralized
CryptoCurrencies and other CryptoCurrencies issued by a major rival
bloc, will become the worst nightmare for the US empire and its
Western allies.

As
one can understand, the CryptoMarket anarchists have nothing to fear.
A CryptoCurrency issued by BRICS, or some member-states, or even
other countries separately, will not be a threat for the
decentralized nature of the rest of CryptoCurrencies. On the
contrary, it will give them a significantly wider field and greater
opportunities for all kinds of transactions inside a dynamically
growing economic bloc which, if nothing else, does not rely on wars
and destruction to maintain its dominance.

A
secretive British police investigation focusing on journalists who
have worked with Edward Snowden’s leaked documents is still active
more than four years after it was launched, The Intercept has
learned.

The
investigation – codenamed “Operation Curable” – is being led
by a counterterrorism unit within London’s Metropolitan Police,
under the direction of the force’s head of Specialist Operations,
Mark Rowley. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the status of the
investigation last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act
request.

The
disclosure that the probe remains active prompted criticism on Monday
from the National Union of Journalists, the U.K.’s largest
journalists’ organization. Sarah Kavanagh, a spokesperson for the
group, said that news reports based on the Snowden documents had
exposed unlawful covert surveillance activities in the public
interest.

“The
media are often the only group in society able to reveal the
intelligence and security forces have exceeded their legitimate
powers and remit,” Kavanagh said. “The Met Police should
be condemned for keeping journalists under investigation because they
worked on the Snowden leaks. The investigation should be halted
immediately. Journalism is not a crime.”

The
origins of the investigation can be traced back to May 2013, when
Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, turned over a cache
of classified documents about government surveillance to journalists,
including Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, who was at that time
working for British news organization The Guardian. Among the
documents were details about mass surveillance programs operated by
the U.K.’s largest spy agency, Government Communications
Headquarters, or GCHQ.

This
article reassesses the relationships of the Central Intelligence
Agency and Department of Defense with the American entertainment
industry. Both governmental institutions present their relationships
as modest in scale, benign in nature, passive, and concerned with
historical and technical accuracy rather than politics. The limited
extant commentary reflects this reassuring assessment. However, we
build on a patchy reassessment begun at the turn of the 21st century,
using a significant new set of documents acquired through the Freedom
of Information Act. We identify three key facets of the
state-entertainment relationship that are under-emphasized or absent
from the existing commentary and historical record: 1. The
withholding of available data from the public; 2. The scale of the
work; and 3. The level of politicization. As such, the article
emphasizes a need to pay closer attention to the deliberate
propaganda role played by state agencies in promoting the US national
security state through entertainment media in western societies.

Part
2 - The Withholding of Available Data from the Public

The
largest library archive about the DOD’s influence on entertainment
is held at Georgetown University and curated by Lawrence Suid. The
authors and several colleagues of different ages, genders, and levels
of academic experience requested access to these files. Suid rejected
each request. In his clearest refusal to share material, Suid
explained that, ‘I trust you will understand the difficulty I would
have in opening my files while I am still using them’,1 though he
has not generated any new analysis since 2005.

In
2004, Robb highlighted some egregious examples of the DOD exerting
political influence over Hollywood scripts. Despite his extensive
discussion of the archived documentation, Suid’s books have made no
direct reference to the politically-motivated changes on numerous
films, including: Clear and Present Danger (e.g. removal of racist
language by the President); Tomorrow Never Dies (e.g. removal of a
joke about the US losing the Vietnam War); Contact (e.g. changing a
scene that makes the military appear paranoid); Thirteen Days (e.g.
an attempt to convince the producers that the Joint Chiefs had
behaved responsibly during the Cuban Missile Crisis); Windtalkers
(e.g. a scene depicting a historically accurate Marine war crime was
removed) – as discussed below – as well as Tears of the Sun (the
military prevented the depiction of ‘nasty conspiracies’); The
Green Berets (e.g. references to the illegal US bombing of Laos were
removed); Rules of Engagement (e.g. the lead character is ‘toned
down’); Black Hawk Down (e.g. a scene depicting the military
machine gunning wild boar is removed); and Goldeneye (the nationality
of a duped American Admiral is changed), as discussed in Alford and
Secker’s 2017 book. Although Suid gives good coverage of film
releases that have been denied cooperation, he chooses not to comment
whatsoever on productions that were terminated due to the DOD’s
refusal to cooperate, including Countermeasures, Top Gun II, and
Fields of Fire.

Direct
approaches to the DOD’s ELO have also proven to be of dubious
utility. Strub claimed ‘I stopped keeping paper records long ago. I
don’t maintain electronic ones, either’ and that a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request could only disclose, at best, a ‘brief
entry in an incomplete data base’. He suggested we contact Suid,
which only serves to highlight how the presence of Suid has helped
insulate the DOD from the FOIA (Strub, 2014).

Actually,
although the ‘incomplete data base’ is mostly lacking information
about the degree of political influence and script changes brought to
bear by the DOD, it does contain some relevant new data and it helped
clarify the scale of DOD support to entertainment products. Despite
this, the overwhelming majority of the new data concerns what the
military provided to the filmmakers in terms of access to people,
locations and vehicles and does not record what the Pentagon asked
for in return. Similarly, our request to the US Navy for copies of
script notes on recently-supported productions resulted, after well
over a year’s delay, in a response saying that they do not keep
copies of script notes (2017). We appealed and provided them with a
copy of their own notes on Lone Survivor, released to another
requester, but no further information has so far been forthcoming.

The
available CIA records regarding their involvement in and influence on
entertainment products are even more scant. While hundreds of pages
of emails and memos regarding Zero Dark Thirty were released in
response to a FOIA lawsuit, the equivalent records regarding other
CIA-supported productions have never been released. Secker and others
have requested files on Argo and Top Chef – which unlike Zero Dark
Thirty were even granted permission to film at CIA headquarters –
but the CIA’s responses say they cannot find even a single
document.

The
same problem applies to the Chase Brandon era (1996–2006) in the
CIA’s liaison office. According to his successor, Paul Barry, when
Brandon left the Agency in late 2006 he took all his papers with him,
and so ‘nothing remains from the past’ (quoted in Jenkins, 2009).
Tricia Jenkins’ work suggests two alternative reactions to this
hole in the CIA’s records: (1) that it does not make much
difference because, as producer Michael Beckner put it, ‘everything
he did with the CIA was done on a handshake and a phone call’
(Jenkins, 2016: 69) and so Brandon’s paper-trail was probably
minimal anyway; and (2) that it might matter enormously because
extensive memos show that Chase Brandon was responsible for
essentially ghost-writing the film The Recruit and so, presumably, he
used this written method for a considerable body of material. The
2016 edition of Jenkins’ book The CIA in Hollywood cites documents
from an unspecified court case proving how:

[Brandon’s]
role far exceeded the one that even an aggressive studio executive or
producer would play in the development of the film … one can’t
help but wonder why [writer Roger] Towne and [producer Jeff] Apple
allowed Brandon to have so much creative control over the original
script unless it was always understood to be a CIA written film
disguised as an independent production. (p. 87)

Jenkins
concludes that ‘it is clear that Brandon was far more involved in
some films’ actual development than anyone outside of the industry
previously imagined’ (p. 87).

Overall,
then, institutional secrecy makes it impossible to assess the true
scale and nature of the political influence wielded on Hollywood by
these two institutions, especially the CIA. We only know that in some
well-documented instances it is fundamental to the politics of these
entertainment products (we discuss some examples below). The CIA
seems to have taken its popular refrains like ‘the secret of our
success is the secret of our success’ and applied them to its work
on entertainment productions. In the wake of Robb’s criticism, the
DOD further limited public access to source materials that reveal
script changes by replacing the twentieth century style of paper
trail with more circumspect and anodyne diary-style activities
reports. This lack of transparency could presumably be quickly
reversed, were it not for a mindset that does not want the public to
know.

The
idea of a universal basic income for all citizens, regardless of
employment status, is an attractive one. Few would disagree with the
idea of creating a safety net to ensure that someone who is down on
their luck or unemployed could afford food, shelter and clothing at a
minimum.

However,
extending universal basic income to the entire working population of
a large country could be less feasible than introducing it in certain
cities or for select populations. For example, there are presently
around 32 million employed adults in the UK plus almost another nine
million economically inactive individuals aged 16-64. If each of
these roughly 40 million people received, say, £500 each month, this
would equate to almost £20 billion a month or £240 billion a year –
approximately double the annual NHS budget. It’s difficult to
imagine this occurring at a time when governments across Europe are
taking every opportunity to implement austerity.

Billionaire
Elon Musk, a proponent of universal basic income, feels that in the
face of increased automation “People will have time to do other
things, more complex things, more interesting things… Certainly
more leisure time.” Some individuals who find their jobs taken
over by robots might seize the opportunity to spend more time with
family and friends or relish the chance to pursue a favorite hobby or
study a topic of interest, whilst receiving a modest allowance.

However,
some people might find themselves struggling to cope with the lack of
a daily routine alongside social isolation and an increasingly
sedentary lifestyle, all of which are to some degree tempered by
having a job, especially one involving physical labor.

The
socioeconomic paradigm shift resulting from the combination of
automation and a universal basic income would be unprecedented as
relationships between workers, bosses, society and the government
would be drastically affected. It might even be more profitable for
owners of large industries to pay their workers a subsistence wage to
stay at home, whilst outsourcing their jobs to robots and computers
who don’t require breaks, sick pay or pensions, won’t go on
strike on account of poor working conditions or inadequate health and
safety standards, and won’t raise thorny issues such as asking for
a share of company profits in exchange for labor performed or
suggesting factories be run as workers’ cooperatives.

Maintaining
a high profit margin without having to deal with trade unions,
strikes or irate workers: a capitalist’s dream. Meanwhile, the
workers can stay at home, isolated from each other, as they enjoy the
latest soap opera and read juicy tabloid gossip. Whatever happens,
one thing is certain: society, work and our daily lives are set to
see radical change over the coming decades.

In a 2007 paper titled “Of
Networks and Nations,” John Arquilla, an expert of new patterns of
warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School, argued that loosely knit
sets of global and regional networks, enabled by the internet, had
begun to challenge the authority of nation-states in the same way
that nation-states had challenged the authority of empires a century
earlier.

In recent years, transnational
militant groups, civil society activists, and hackers have all been
able to inflict defeats on lumbering state adversaries, in part by
leveraging the speed of connectivity and communication afforded by
the internet. “The networks came to push, to prod, and to
confront. They came to solve the supranational problems of injustice,
inequity and environmental degradation that a nation-based capitalist
system could never, in their view, deal with adequately,” wrote
Arquilla. “In short, the networks came to change things, and
they came not in peace but with swords.”

The 21st century has seen the
rise of “gray-zone conflicts,” where armed force, politics, and
media increasingly blur together, such as the 2014 war between Israel
and the Palestinians. Gray-zone conflicts are seldom interstate wars
but are more likely to be civil uprisings, conflicts between states
and militant groups, and domestic insurgences. As scholars David
Barno and Nora Bensahel have written, these conflicts “involve
some aggression or use of force, but in many ways their defining
characteristic is ambiguity — about the ultimate objectives, the
participants, whether international treaties and norms have been
violated, and the role that military forces should play in response.”

It is within this ambiguous
environment that information warfare waged online by activist groups
and individuals is playing a critical, at times even definitive role.
As the dominance over information flows held by nation-states
evaporates, their ability to control the trajectory of conflicts by
managing international opinion and maintaining domestic authority is
eroding as well.

The threat of this change, as
well as the political impact of viral misinformation, has led to
calls from some corners for greater regulation and involvement by
tech companies in putting curbs on online speech. Although improved
media education for the general public is likely necessary, any
nostalgia for an earlier era when information was controlled by a few
hegemonic media institutions is wildly misplaced.

“If we allow the problems
that exist with social media and new technologies to be used as a
pretext to roll things back, it would be the ultimate crime,”
says Sienkiewicz. “The old media environment in which billions
of people had little access to getting their stories told – in
which entire classes of people were effectively deemed by media
institutions as not worth reporting on – is not something that we
should want to return to. We should address the problems that exist
with new media, not try to turn back the clock and deem this all a
failed experiment.”

For better or worse, thanks to
social media and smartphones, a version of the “guerilla world war”
predicted by Marshall McLuhan – a war over information drawing in
states, militaries, activists, and ordinary people in equal measure –
has come into existence. The consequences are likely to transform
politics, conflict, and daily life for generations to come. McLuhan
himself suggested that surviving in this new world would be possible
only through a conscious embrace of change, rather than a retreat
into reactionary policies.

“The new technological
environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to
alter their old value structures,” he said, in a 1969 interview
with Playboy Magazine. “When an individual or social group feels
that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change,
its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury.”

“But for all their
lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.”

29 November, 2017

Kit
Walsh, a staff attorney at EFF, working on free speech, net
neutrality, copyright, coders' rights, and other issues, spoke to
Aaron Mate and The Real News about the latest developments on Trump
administration's attempt to kill Net Neutrality.

Walsh
gave an example of how the corporate cartel on the Internet field
will attempt to sabotage independent websites that are not aligned
with the mainstream media narratives, in case that the plan of the
chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, will pass
through Congress.

Walsh
also revealed that there is a continuous fierce fight between the
public who overwhelmingly supports free Internet and the corporate
monopolies who seek to impose a covert censorship through a new
McCarthyism in order to silent the truly independent information
inside the Web.

Walsh
describes the kind of blackmail and sabotage against an independent
news website like the Real News:

For
instance, Comcast owns a share in Universal Media Company. AT&T
has its own streaming media platform. Verizon briefly had a news
platform where they said that people were not to discuss net
neutrality or mass surveillance, because that was contrary to their
corporate interests.

So,
what companies can do if this proposed order goes through is they'll
be able to threaten to block access to your website. So they'll say,
"Hey Real News, it would be a shame if you could no longer
reach Verizon customers. Why don't you pay us an extra fee?"
And short of that, they can say, "We're going to speed up our
own news content. It's gonna be a better experience for people. And
your connection is going to be degraded."

That
connection, that internet subscribers are already paying for, they're
gonna put road bumps in the way so, when they go to watch the Real
News, they're not able to get a high quality stream. They have to
make do with less bandwidth or it's less reliable.

In
the previous cycle, back in 2015. We broke records for comments to
the FCC. And the overwhelming majority were in favor of protecting
net neutrality with legally enforceable rules, which ultimately it
did. This cycle, there were a lot of comments from both sides. There
were some form letters, many of which are people legitimately
agreeing with the content of those form letters, some maybe not. And
under any measure, the FCC has acknowledged that the majority favored
net neutrality and keeping the existing scheme. And an analysis that
was done by the ISPs themselves, which you would expect to favor
their side, actually found that of all the people who went to the FCC
website, who bothered to type in their own unique comments, 98
percent favored net neutrality. So, it's very clear that public
sentiment is on the side of keeping these rules. People are not
interested in handing over control of what they're able to read and
do online to their internet service providers.

Yesterday
was the day that Ajit Pai announced his intentions clearly. And just
that day alone, our coalition drove 175,000 calls to Congress.
Congress is the place where the FCC vote can be stopped right now. So
the today's announcement is just a proposed order. They're going to
vote December 14th. FCC votes have been stopped in the past. And if
we keep melting down the phone lines at Congress, that's our best
shot.

Therefore,
what we will see in case that the new plan will pass through
Congress, is a further, official step by the establishment to silence
independent information sources.

Beijing’s
Dongfeng-41 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test was
broadcast over China Central Television on Sunday, about one week
after images of the multi-warhead missile went viral across Chinese
social media platforms.

The
missile has been tested eight times, according to the Hong Kong-based
South China Morning Post, which reported that the most recent launch
took place early November somewhere in China's western desert region.

DF-41
is one of the farthest traveling ICBMs in the world, rubbing
shoulders with Israel's Jericho 3, Russia's RS-26 Rubezh and the US'
LGM-30 Minuteman III.

According
to Chinese state media, the ICBM has a range of 12,000 kilometers
(7,500 miles), can strike within 328 feet (100 meters) of its
intended target, and cruises faster than Mach 10 (7,672 miles per
hour).

The
missile measures approximately 16.5 meters (54 feet) in length and
2.78 meters in diameter (9.1 feet) and carries up to 10 warheads.

The
missile can launch from a variety of platforms, including from a
stationary silo as well as mobile rail and road platforms.

The
Global Times, a Chinese state-run media outlet, reported earlier this
month that the DF-41 would be commissioned with the People's
Liberation Army Rocket Force. Nevertheless, former military officials
have said on CCTV that the missile is already operational.

Paris
is seeking to establish closer working ties with its former colonies
in West Africa. Speaking to Sputnik, some African observers
characterized French President Emmanuel Macron's African tour as a
sign of "transition" in relations, while others insist that
Africa needs to gain independence from French dominance.

French
President Emmanuel Macron has embarked on a three-day tour to visit
Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast and Ghana in order to present a new
model of relations with the continent based on "education,
investment and business development." Still, critics say that
Macron's strategy is new in name only.

The
continent's student associations and trade unions cite the fact that
Paris' repeated promises to modernize Franco-African relations have
yet to be fulfilled.

Meanwhile,
citing Radio France International, Reuters wrote Tuesday that a
grenade was thrown at French soldiers injuring three civilians in the
Burkina Faso capital "just hours before Macron was due to speak
before a university audience at Ouagadougou."

It
was also reported that Macron's convoy was attacked with stones,
however, later the French president's office denied the reports
saying that stones were thrown at one of the vehicles transporting
members of a delegation accompanying Macron in Burkina Faso.

This
article reassesses the relationships of the Central Intelligence
Agency and Department of Defense with the American entertainment
industry. Both governmental institutions present their relationships
as modest in scale, benign in nature, passive, and concerned with
historical and technical accuracy rather than politics. The limited
extant commentary reflects this reassuring assessment. However, we
build on a patchy reassessment begun at the turn of the 21st century,
using a significant new set of documents acquired through the Freedom
of Information Act. We identify three key facets of the
state-entertainment relationship that are under-emphasized or absent
from the existing commentary and historical record: 1. The
withholding of available data from the public; 2. The scale of the
work; and 3. The level of politicization. As such, the article
emphasizes a need to pay closer attention to the deliberate
propaganda role played by state agencies in promoting the US national
security state through entertainment media in western societies.

Part
1 - Method and Literature: The Need to Refocus on Entertainment
Production Processes

When
examining the political nature of a piece of entertainment, we can
variously consider the intentions and motivations of its creators,
how meaning is encoded in the text itself, or audience reception. All
three are important and legitimate approaches within media studies
but it is a striking feature of the literature that so little is
written about the role of the US national security state, most
prominently embodied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the
Department of Defense (DOD), in shaping the content of screen
entertainment.

This
tendency to shy away from production analysis has been exacerbated
and legitimized by the postmodern turn, the pervasive influence of
Freudian analysis, and the cross-disciplinary emphasis on audiences.
Ed Herman, co-creator of the propaganda model (PM) that attempts to
account for the uncritical nature of elite media discourse, explains
that such a focus on micro-issues of language, textual interpretation
and gender and ethnic identity is ‘politically safe and holds forth
the possibility of endless deconstruction of small points in a
growing framework of jargon’. Consequently, Hollywood journalist Ed
Rampell (2005) can argue that ‘movies are our collective dreams’
and ‘emanations of the collective unconscious’. Influential film
critic and scholar Robin Wood (2003) commented that movies are ‘as
at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams
of their audiences’. US entertainment, it seems, is to be
interpreted and reinterpreted ad infinitum.

In
contrast, when analysing authoritarian forms of governance,
scholarship invariably assumes considerable state influence over
entertainment systems and that they are used as crucial tools to
spread misinformation and disinformation (Hoffmann et al., 1996;
Proway, 1982; Qin, 2017; Reeves, 2004; Taylor, 1998; Welch, 2001).
Similarly, although critical scholars of US news media have suffered
marginalization in academia, even here there has at least long been a
body of material about the role of the state in shaping discourse for
its own ends by authors like Carl Bernstein (1977) and Ed Herman and
Noam Chomsky (2002) and watchdog organizations like the Glasgow Media
Group and Media Lens.

We
also recognize that there is a respectable body of work that
demonstrates how entertainment – going back to the origins of
Hollywood in early 20th century America – represents US power
(Boggs and Pollard, 2007; Burgoyne, 2010; Kellner, 2010; McCrisken
and Pepper, 2007; Prince, 1992; Scott, 2011; Westwell, 2006). One of
the authors on this article, Matthew Alford, engaged similarly in a
mainly text-based set of readings for his early work (2008). What has
long been lacking, though, is a robust body of scholarship on how the
state actually affects productions. Here, we show that a major reason
for this deficiency is the difficulties associated with acquiring
useful documentation, largely the reluctance of state officials in
releasing it.

There
was a brief flurry of new books and articles on state involvement in
the entertainment industry around the turn of the century, but each
of these was decidedly narrow in scope. David Eldridge (2000) and
Frances Stonor Saunders (1999) concentrated on the early Cold War,
with their new material on cinema being limited to their discovery of
an official at Paramount Studios who sent letters to an anonymous CIA
contact explaining how he was using his position to advance the
interests of the agency in the 1950s.

In
two major early 21st century studies, Suid and Haverstick (2002,
2005) systematically document the relationship between the military
and Hollywood. However, remarkably – particularly given the detail
with which he writes and his unique access to source material –
Suid does not question ‘the legitimacy of the military’s
relationship with the film industry’ (noting that Congress permits
it 2002, p. xi) and characterizes the Pentagon entertainment liaison
chief Phil Strub as ‘simply a conduit between the film industry and
the armed services’ (Suid and Robb, 2005: 75, 77 ). A scattergun
and journalistic account by David Robb (2004), the only other
researcher we know to attain even partial, temporary access to the
same set of documents as Suid, highlights numerous cases typically
ignored by Suid that point to much more politicized and controversial
impacts by the DOD. In short, Suid utterly dominates the source
material and his macro and micro analyses are, in light of our new
analysis, little short of a whitewash (Alford, 2016; Alford and
Secker, 2017).

From
2014 to 2017 we made numerous requests to the CIA, US Army, Navy, and
Air Force with regards to their cooperation on films and television
shows. It quickly became apparent that there had been a huge surge
in the number of television shows supported by the DOD,
especially since it decided circa 2005 to begin supporting reality
TV. The authors compiled a master list of DOD-assisted films and TV
using IMDB, the Entertainment Liaison Officer (ELO) reports and DOD
lists, and miscellaneous files, which produced a total of 814 film
titles, 697 made prior to 2004, and 1133 TV titles, 977 since 2004.
Lawrence Suid had missed a handful of DOD-supported films and has not
updated his lists since 2005, so neither he nor any other author had
documented the huge scale of DOD support for television. Added to
that, in 2014 the CIA’s first ELO, Chase Brandon, published a full
list of dozens of film and television shows on which he had worked,
which was many more than any previous public records had indicated.
The White House, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI had
also been involved, as shown by infrequent news reports. By all
measures, even without considering the role of less politically
controversial entities like the Coast Guard and NASA, the US
government has been involved with the entertainment industry on a
scale several times greater than the latest scholarship has
indicated.

This
article shows that the characterization of the DOD and CIA ELOs as
minimally and passively involved in the film industry, merely
receiving and processing requests for technical and other production
assistance, is inaccurate. To do so, we identify three key facets of
the state-entertainment relationship that are under-emphasized or
absent from the existing commentary and historical record: 1. The
withholding of available data from the public; 2. The scale of the
work; and 3. The level of politicization.

Ongoing
advancements in technology are expected to lead to further job losses
in future. Accountancy firm PwC predict that in the UK up to 30
percent (10 million) existing, mostly low-skilled and manual jobs
could be taken over by robots within the next 15 years.

Economies
with comparable figures are the US (38 percent), Germany (35 percent)
and Japan (21 percent). According to PwC’s chief economist John
Hawksworth “jobs where you've got more of a human touch, like
health and education,” which do not easily lend themselves to
automation are expected to be somewhat protected. Some job losses
could be offset as new industries develop on the back of the growth
in robotics and AI.

However,
there are concerns that workers lacking the necessary skills to
prosper in the coming years could be left behind in this 21st century
industrial revolution, leading to greater income inequality.

Introducing
a universal basic income for all citizens, to create a safety net for
those whose jobs end up being done by robots, has been touted as a
solution. Billionaires Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg
have spoken in favor of this initiative. Branson comments: “Basic
income is going to be all the more important. If a lot more wealth is
created by AI, the least that the country should be able to do is
that a lot of that wealth that is created by AI goes back into making
sure that everybody has a safety net.”

Finland
is currently testing out a two-year scheme to give all citizens €560
a month and parts of the Netherlands, Hawaii and Ontario are
considering, or in the process of conducting small experiments,
giving all citizens a basic income.

During the initial upsurge of
enthusiasm about the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions, observers noted
how effectively social media had been used as an organizing tool by
young activists. While it would be overstating the case to attribute
the revolutions themselves to social media (as some of the more
breathless analyses did at the time), the impact that online social
networks, cellphones, and new satellite television stations had on
mobilizing and informing people in these societies was undeniable.
The idea of young people using social media to topple dictatorships
played into the narrative of “tech-utopianism,” still in vogue at
the time, stimulating the idea that future political changes might be
organized from below through the liberating power of the internet.

The grim years that followed
the initial uprisings have mostly dispelled this narrative. While
liberal activists were adept at organizing online, so were political
Islamists and jihadist groups. These groups were better funded,
better organized, and already had experience operating clandestinely
– using the latest technologies for propaganda, recruitment, and
networking. Over time, it would be Islamist groups like the Muslim
Brotherhood, as well as jihadists, that moved into the vanguard of
the revolutions, pushing aside the liberal activists who had
initially captured the world’s imagination.

“Digital World War” is an
analysis of how opposition movements, and Islamists in particular,
have used social media as a tool of waging war against established
governments. Haroon Ullah is a former State Department official and
expert on Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami movement. Unlike
Patrikarikos’s book, “Digital World War” is a staid academic
analysis of how social media and other new technologies are altering
the dynamics between central governments and opposition movements,
both Islamist and liberal. But Ullah’s work also addresses the crux
of how social media is upending the traditional power dynamics
governing war and politics.

Perhaps the most destabilizing
aspect of new technologies is the way that they have potentially
supercharged the speed of political change. Youth-led revolutions in
Egypt and Tunisia began and ended within a matter of weeks, toppling
governments that had been in place for decades. Although both
countries had suffered from long-standing structural problems, the
sparks for both uprisings were lit over individual outrages –
corruption and police brutality – that were spread and rapidly
popularized over social media. Though many bystanders later joined
the protests for other reasons, the speed and scale with which people
initially organized would have been impossible in an era before
cellphones and the internet.

The very speed of these
movements, however, made it hard to build a sustainable order out of
the collapse of the old regimes. While it was true that online
mobilization played a role in toppling both Egyptian strongman Hosni
Mubarak and Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, it also
allowed little time for real leaders to emerge or for political
platforms to be agreed upon. While the people who went into the
streets were united in their indignation over injustice and their
opposition to the old order, they had very different ideas about the
future of their countries. When the regimes collapsed, the only
parties established enough to take advantage were those aligned with
the long-suppressed Muslim Brotherhood.

“It was not a matter of
Islam being some defining feature of Tunisian identity — despite
the Islamists claims,” Ullah writes, regarding the Tunisian
revolution and the subsequent election of the liberal Islamist party
Ennahda, “Rather, the victory was the natural outcome of the
inevitable schism between the nature of the revolution and the
readiness of the Islamists for power.”

Social media is not the first
information technology that has had helped galvanize revolutionary
change. Radio, telegraph, and even the printing press all helped
precipitate major socio-political transformations in the past, the
latter famously helping enable the Christian Reformation.

More recently, the groundwork
for the 1979 Iranian Revolution was laid with the help of a
relatively new technology: Popular speeches by the revolution’s
leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were recorded and copied onto
cassette tapes, which were then rapidly replicated and distributed.
Unlike social media movements that can close the cycle between
outrage and protest to a matter of days, however, it took Khomeini
years of painstaking media work to help build mass support for an
opposition movement in Iran. By the time the that Iranians finally
went into the streets against the Shah – motivated by many
different ideological currents – Khomeini was a well-known and
popular spiritual leader within the opposition. When the monarchy
fell, he was well-placed to marginalize his ideological rivals and
consolidate clerical power over the country.

The difference between Iran’s
uprising and the leaderless revolutions of today is vast and points
to one of the major pitfalls of internet activism. Online organizing
and propaganda can be legitimately useful for destabilizing regimes,
especially rigidly authoritarian ones that need to strictly control
the flow of information. But because of the speed with which it can
precipitate change, it is less useful for building up the networks
and organizations needed to fill the gap created when old governments
actually fall.

“When there is no single
leader to focus a political movement — Khomeini, Mandela, Lenin —
there may be more and faster revolutions than previously, but there
are fewer revolutionary outcomes and scenarios,” Ullah writes.
“So when a dictatorship – by definition and decree the sole
and strongest institution in a country — is deposed by
insurrections like the Arab Spring, what comes into the place of the
power vacuum is not dictated by those who have created it.”

28 November, 2017

The
WIKILEAKS
Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD)
holds the world's largest searchable collection of United States
confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As
of April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately
1 billion words. The collection covers US involvements in, and
diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on earth. It
is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever
published. The PlusD collection, built and curated by WikiLeaks, is
updated from a variety of sources, including leaks, documents
released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and documents
released by the US State Department systematic declassification
review.

A
cable from April 2008 gives details about an Israeli operation to
destroy a Syrian nuclear reactor under construction. Three
interesting remarks are:

1st,
the fact that the cable describes that Israel acted without the
permission of the US, 2nd, that the US officials were convinced that
the Syrian government was collaborating with North Korea on building
the reactor, 3rd, that the US officials were convinced that the
reactor would had been used for the production of nuclear weapons.

As
described in the summary, on September 6, 2007, Israel destroyed a
nuclear reactor Syria was clandestinely constructing, we judge with
North Korean assistance. The reactor site was in Syria's eastern
desert region in a location called al-Kibar. On April 24, Executive
Branch officials briefed Congress and the press on evidence that lead
the USG to conclude that the Syrian facility at al-Kibar was a
nuclear reactor being constructed clandestinely, and therefore in
violation of Syria's NPT-required safeguards agreement with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Some
key parts:

...
the Israeli air force conducted a mission over Syria on September 6,
2007. [...] the purpose of that Israeli mission was to destroy a
clandestine nuclear reactor that Syria was constructing in its
eastern desert near a place we call al-Kibar. The Israeli mission was
successful - the reactor was damaged beyond repair. Syria has
completed efforts to clean up the site and destroy evidence of what
was really there, constructing a new building on the old site.

The
existence of this reactor was dangerous and destabilizing for the
region, and we judged that it could have been only weeks away from
becoming operational at the time it was destroyed by the Israeli air
force.

...
we assessed that once the pumphouse and pipe system were complete in
early August, the reactor could begin operation at any time. Once
operations began, certainly a military option would have been much
more problematic with radioactive material present.

...
we conducted our own intensive internal policy deliberations
regarding what to do about this disturbing and destabilizing
development.

We
discussed policy options with the Israelis, but in the end Israel
made its own decision to destroy the reactor. This decision was made
by Israel alone - they did not seek our consent. Nonetheless, we
understand Israel's decision. Israel saw this reactor, and what Syria
may have intended to do with it, as an existential threat that
required it to act to defend itself.

The
North Koreans have stated that there is no ongoing nuclear
cooperation with any foreign country in violation of applicable
domestic and international laws and treaties, and that there will be
no such cooperation in the future.

North
Korea has agreed to cooperate on verification activities in line with
its past commitments on non-proliferation, including as stated in the
October 3, 2007, agreement, and to provide additional explanations as
necessary.